Travails of city life

The travails of city life.  Where to begin.



Lets start with crowds.  There are crowds everywhere - in the grocery store, at sporting events, in parking lots, restaurants. You name it and there;s a crowd - standing in line and waiting is the norm. I live in what is called the DFW (Dallas/Ft. Worth) Metroplex, populated by close to seven million folks in a wide variety of shapes and colors. loosely packed into its nearly 9300 square miles.  That's pretty large and I'm sure by many standards the density is nothing compared to places like India, China and others.  Dallas is the eastern anchor and Ft Worth the western anchor of this area and there are seven other principal cities  (so sayeth Wikipedia) and 14 different counties, each with their own rules and regulations - laws -  and the like.

Dallas

Ft Worth

Crowds beget traffic jams and we certainly have our share of them at commute time. Twenty years ago when we first moved here they were non-existent, As Mr Zimmerman said. the times they are a changin. And traffic begets accidents.

Crime statistics are generally higher in large areas - as are homeless populations.  Gang membership more prevalent.

More people mean schools and public services are more costly.  School quality varies widely but you tend to be restricted to schools in your immediate area.  Woe be to the family in a less than ideal area without the resources to send the kids to private school.

Every area has its quirks.  Here we have wet and dry counties - a direct result of the undue religious influence of Baptists and Methodists in bygone eras. Luckily my county is wet.  Ahem.  Of course there are no sales on Sundays (in stores). There is a move afoot to correct that.

The smallest city I have lived in is a little berg called Rocky Hill, Connecticut.  We lived there in 1976 and to a varying degree we experienced many of the same issues there even though the population was less than 20,000. Rocky Hill is a suburb of Hartford - a smallish "big" city. The DFW Metroplex population is nearly twice that of the entire state of Connecticut as is the land area.

Of course there is an up side to living in a city - alas that's a topic for another discussion. See ya next week, same Bat time, same Bat channel. Be sure to check in on my LBC pals to see what they have to say on this week's topic.